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Bitcoin breaks above $20k

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Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#341

Post by throwaway-8c93 »

arithma wrote: post #87

Just a question, isn't all criticism against bitcoin applicable to gold? Money/Currency/Value in general can't be reduced or derived from first principles. You always have to take into account human nature, economic activity, and most unfortunately: psychology. So all criticism about how bitcoin inherently being pointless, sounds like off-tune. I want good reasons to/NOT-to buy in. First-world country citizens kind o…

Gold is a material with certain physical properties that cannot be replicated: it's attractively shiny, rare, dense, and chemically inert. These properties make it ideal for an international store of value across time. Moreover, those properties are independent of the current jurisdiction. Regardless of society's conventions, iron will never be worth more than gold.

Although Bitcoin's current implementation limits the supply to 21M BTC, the idea of a cryptocurrency can be replicated ad-nauseum and is 100% fungible. For all intents and purposes, it has no intrinsic advantage over, say Ethereum or Monero. The fact there are perfectly fine alternatives for it makes the value proposition much more shaky than gold. If people en masse, for any reason switch to other cryptocurrency, the existing tokens are rendered useless. And there are many scenarios in which this can happen - government action, protocol attack, untangling of distributed trust, breaking SHA256, BTC no longer fashionable, transaction cost creep,...

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#342

Post by Taek »

sandeeps_ wrote: post #323
capnorange wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

coldcard if Bitcoin only. Trezor for crypto. Avoid Ledger if possible. I own all three. Currently using Coldcard + Casa.

what's wrong with Ledger?

Ledger is closed source, which is not great. Also, we've submitted bug reports to them before explaining how malware on a laptop could extract coins from users, and the response we got was 'won't fix'...

Which is not great. The entire reason you use a hardware wallet is because you assume that less secure hardware has been compromised.

I don't know that I would go as far as saying 'don't use ledger' though, all the hardware wallets have pros and cons and we don't really have a champion 'this one is best' yet. Though I might point to https://foundationdevices.com/ as being on the right track.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#343

Post by beezle »

tempsy wrote: post #72
isuckatcoding wrote: post #48

But why...? > When this [rally to near $20,000] happened in 2017, there was a real lack of products for the new converts to experience, whereas today there are endless uses, protocols, services across farming, lending, standard trading, etc Is this really true though? My first instinct isn’t at all to go to blockchain/cryptocurrency for farming.

i don’t think it has anything to do with more use cases institutions are now buying bitcoin as a diversified asset class

Institutions are in bitcoin because there is far too much free cash to soley invest in equities, bonds or money markets. Institutions are also in bitcoin because it is a market that is easily moved so they can make significant trading profits.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#344

Post by Taek »

valarauko wrote: post #127

Slight deviation: does anybody have recommendations for hardware wallets? Pros/Cons?

I like https://foundationdevices.com/

Foundation devices is committed to using fully open source designs, all the way from the software down to the firmware, the hardware designs, and eventually I believe they hope to open source the secure elements and semiconductor designs as well.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#345

Post by mywittyname »

ryanlol wrote: post #199
three_seagrass wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decade latter and it's still a hobby currency. Price is not a sole indicator of faith in a currency.

There are vast amounts of professional drug dealers making their living from transactions using this “hobby currency”.

They also use Venmo.

You'd think that would be stupid because it's public, but so are blockchains.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#346

Post by NoOneNew »

mywittyname wrote: post #319
NoOneNew wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I do agree that crypto needs to step away from the current "investment vehicle" mentality and be treated more like a "currency"... I'm still lost how yet another currency is going to help society. Im not trying to be an ass, I'm being serious on figuring this out. I constantly see this argument with no real logic other than trying to essentially use Marxist ideals of "redistribution of wealth" to a disenfranchi…

It's useful for moving money from countries with capital restrictions into USA dollars. I know a few people from SEA who use BTC for exactly this purpose.

You do understand the underlying principle as to why cross country capital transfer investigations are done... right? As a hint, look up cocaine cowboys and miami banks (particularly suntrust).

While I get it's beneficial for average citizens looking to save a bit on tax/duty fees... it's a lot like wearing a condom when both of you dont care to know each other's name. You have that practice for a reason.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#347

Post by spurgu »

xur17 wrote: post #287
ackbar03 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What can it do exactly though? A lot of talk about decentralization and distributed database and Yada Yada Yada. I'd love to find a good use case for blockchain but so far it's elusive

Cash on the internet. Basically, the ability to send money to someone else without any intermediary, in the same way that you can hand cash to someone else when selling something on craigslist, etc. This is particularly helpful in cases like gift cards where fraud is a problem, and margins are thin, and industries that are blocked by other payment processors [0]. We can argue about whether or not all of the opportuni…

Prime example with Pornhub right there, along with all other things Visa/Mastercard has decided to block over the years (Wikileaks comes first to mind).

> We can argue about whether or not all of the opportunities are a good thing for society or not, but crypto does solve a problem for them.

Agreed. I'd argue that being able to buy drugs online is a great solution, but there are good arguments against it as well.

Crypto is also immune to confiscation of funds, due to whatever reasons (tax fraud investigation, whatever), this can also be argued whether it's a good thing or not. Many countries have banks and governments that most certainly can't be trusted.

The bottom line with crypto is what I would expect Americans in general to appreciate - freedom/choice.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#348

Post by phoinix »

jcranmer wrote: post #318
phoinix wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a person distrusts always anything, from anyone, from anywhere then it is true that blockchain doesn't provide any solution. However blockchain can make it more difficult, for a corrupt official to change some official documents, or in some cases to make them disappear completely. The timestamp of the arrest is of the utterly most importance. When a cop that may be corrupt or not, we don't know, upload the arrest…

From what I've seen of police misconduct, the general form of misconduct is that the police officers generally just blatantly lie. The problem isn't that they're editing records of things that happened, the problem is that they're lying about the records in the first place--and I think the George Floyd protests make perfectly clear that they are more than willing to lie even when they know that hard evidence (in the…

Yeah, i confess there is a tiny little probability that blockchain doesn't solve all of the worlds problems. But when we can have documents that absolutely no human can alter, then that human doesn't have absolute power, so it means, this less than absolute power, corrupts less than absolutely. A step to the right direction maybe?

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#349

Post by DennisP »

anonymousDan wrote: post #239
drcross wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DAO rollback made them untrustable for me. You do you but a key required feature of my cryptocurrency should be sovereignty.

I hear this criticism a lot. And I don't disagree with it fundamentally, but I would be interested to hear how its advocates justify the decision. How do the Ethereum founders attempt to rebut it? Are there any good counterarguments?

Ethereum was only about a year old at the time. When Bitcoin a year-and-a-half old, it had a bug that required a five-hour chain rollback.

Bitcoin people will object and say that was a bug with the blockchain itself. However, sample code on ethereum.org had vulnerabilities similar to TheDAO's bug, so arguably it was a platform issue on Ethereum as well.

There have been large thefts from contracts since then, including a >$100M theft from Parity, the most popular client at the time. Parity made several attempts to get another fork to recover their funds, and they were roundly rejected by the community.

Re: Bitcoin breaks above $20k

#350

Post by albroland »

three_seagrass wrote: post #272
quattrofan wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they "control it" exactly?

By design, any changes to update the Bitcoin protocol need to be accepted by the miners with the majority of computing power - a.k.a. a hard fork. For many reasons, such as stealing electricity and having access to chip manufacturers, there are a handful of miners in China who have the majority of the computing power for Bitcoin. They can mine bitcoins at a cost that is less than for everyone else. This creates probl…

VisaNet actually is a bit faster than that; they claim current capacity for about 75k/s.
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